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A friend was standing in line at returns at Home Depot yesterday when the white man in front of him told another man, who was hispanic, he was going to call Trump to come get him. I was horrified and would not be able to keep my mouth shut if I had been confronted by that bigoted white man. Disgust!!!!!

Immediately, one of my friend’s friends, apparently a conservative, piped up with this:

What about freedom of speech? Please explain “HOW” this man is a bigot? It was probably not a nice thing to say, but we do have freedom of speech.

Like this:

The Awl provides an in-depth look at the outrageous “suggested for you” news stories that are on many media sites (like the News and Observer).

This is a chumbox. It is a variation on the banner ad which takes the form of a grid of advertisements that sits at the bottom of a web page underneath the main content. It can be found on the sites of many leading publishers, including nymag.com, dailymail.co.uk, usatoday.com, and theawl.com (where it was “an experiment that has since ended.”)

The chumboxes were placed there by one of several chumvendors?—?Taboola, Outbrain, RevContent, Adblade, and my favorite, Content.ad?—?who design them to seamlessly slip into a particular design convention established early within the publishing web, a grid of links to appealing, perhaps-related content at the bottom of the content you intentionally came to consume. In return, publishers who deploy chumboxes receive money, traffic, or both. Typically, these publishers collect a percentage of the rates that the chumvendors charge advertisers to be placed inside the grids. These gains can be pocketed, or re-invested into purchasing the publisher’s own placements in similar grids on thousands of other sites amongst the chummy sea, reaping bulk traffic straight from the reeking depths of chumville.

Like this:

I’m not too happy about the proposed merger between Disney and 20th Century Fox. Pretty sure we need less media consolidation, not more!

Walt Disney Company announced Thursday that it has agreed to acquire the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox, including Fox’s movie studio and entertainment television networks, as well as Fox’s international TV assets.

Why it matters: The new mega-media company will have better leverage to compete with tech giants like Netflix for entertainment viewership and more opportunities to expand Disney’s legacy sports brand, ESPN.

Like this:

Undercover videographer and conservative political activist James O’Keefe made a vow on the eve of President Trump’s inauguration: “I’m going after the media next,” he said. “We have your name. We have your number. We are embedded in your institutions. We are inside the newsrooms, and that is our next target.” O’Keefe later claimed he already has “hundred of hours” of media-related video.

This threat comes as O’Keefe’s prominence in politics has spiked. He’s known for stings that feature secretly obtained footage edited for maximum impact (he’s most famous for an undercover operation that led to the downfall of the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN). O’Keefe, whose work on voter fraud President Trump endorsed just weeks before Election Day, recently told The Washington Post that his latest sting video led the FBI to arrest a man suspected of planning a violent inauguration protest. “It legitimizes what we’re doing,” O’Keefe told the Post. “It’s a new era for us.”

Like this:

News broke today that Hallie is trying again, this time with friends, to get North Carolina’s environment back on track. Go, Hallie!

Hallie Turner was 13 years old when she stood outside a Wake County courtroom telling media crews with cameras trained on her that she planned to continue to fight for action on climate change despite her unsuccessful attempt to sue North Carolina over its environmental rules.

Now 15, Hallie is trying again to get the state Department of Environmental Quality and the state Environmental Management Commission to adopt a rule calling for a sharp reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases over the next three decades. This time, two other North Carolina teens — Emily Liu, 16, of Chapel Hill, and Arya Pontula, a Raleigh 17-year-old, will join Hallie in petitioning the commission.

With the help of Ryke Longest at the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, and Our Children’s Trust, a Oregon-based nonprofit focused on climate change, the teens hope to persuade the state to adopt a rule ensuring that by 2050 carbon dioxide emissions would be down to zero.

“It would be a future in which you would not be burning fossil fuels to power your homes,” Longest said on Monday, the day before the teens plan to file their petition.

Like this:

“Newspaper had been running the equivalent of a very nice high-end steakhouse,” she says. Then McDonald’s moved to town and started selling untold numbers of cheap hamburgers. Newspaper thought, “Let’s compete with that,” and dropped the steak for hamburger, even though it had no real expertise in producing hamburgers. “What they should have done is improve the steak product.”